Joe  Bobman  

Michelle  Wallace’s  “Black  Superwoman”  in  Advertisements      These  four  images  were  all  published  in  Ebony  magazine  in  March  of  1970.    

The  first  image  is  a  clip  from  the  front  cover  of  that  issue  and  features  Clarence  Williams  III  and  Gloria  Foster.      The  other  images  are  all  advertisements.  

The  cover  image  presents  a  particular  positional  relationship  between  Clarence  Williams  III  and  Gloria  Foster.    Williams,  with  his  arm  around  Foster  and  his  intense  gaze  on  the  camera,  occupies  a  very  different  position  than  Foster,  whose  gaze  is  directed  at  Williams.    The  caption  text  reinforces  this  ordered  relationship,  naming  Williams  by  his  acting  role  and  Foster  simply  with  the  word  “wife.”    Michelle  Wallace  and  Eldridge  Cleaver’s  texts  offer  some  ways  of  reading  this  image  in  the  particular  way  it  frames  this  relationship.    Williams  serious  face,  stern  gaze  and  afro  signal  the  Black  power  macho  archetype  of  which  Wallace  speaks,  and  the  affectionate  and  gaze  that  Foster  (also  exhibiting  her  afro)  is  giving  Williams  connects  to  Wallace’s  description  of  her  conception  of  women’s  roles  at  the  side  of  a  masculine  black  revolution.    This  image  presents  a  portrayal  of  this  particular  human  relationship  in  a  way  of  which  Wallace  is  highly  critical,  and  I  would  agree  

with  her.    The  front  cover  presents  Williams  as  an  actor  and  Foster  as  a  wife,  despite  her  own  extremely  successful  professional  career.  

I  hadn’t  intended  on  including  the  front  cover  in  this  journal  entry,  but  I  think  that  it  frames  the  second  and  third  images  in  a  useful  way.    These  two  images  are  clips  of  hair-­‐product  adds  from  that  same  issue  of  Ebony.    They  are  all  for  the  same  company,  called  Supreme  Beauty  Products.    The  masculine  product  is  called  Duke,  the  feminine  product  is  called  Raveen.  

The  gender  narrative  presented  by  these  series  of  advertisements  resonates  very  strongly  with  the  narrative  that  Michelle  Wallace  in  “Black  Macho  and  the  Myth  of  the  Superwoman.”    Black  women  have  two  places  in  these  images:  they  are  either  positioned  alongside  strong  black  men  or  alone.    The  black  woman  as  a  supporter  of  the  black  macho  figure  appears  in  the  advertisement  for  “Duke  Natural,”  again  alongside  the  man,  marginal  to  him  in  the  narrative  of  the  add,  and  with  her  focus  on  him.    The  text  of  the  add  reads  “No  sense  keeping  a  Natural  man  waiting,”  signaling  the  “Natural”  man’s  importance  and  the  woman’s  subordinate  role.      

In  contrast,  the  two  women  presented  in  the  ad  for  the  feminine  products  are  starkly  alone,  whether  they  wear  their  hair  in  an  Afro  or  straightened.    There  is  no  supportive  man  at  their  shoulder,  no  partner  with  an  affectionate  adoring  gaze.    Michelle  Wallace  wrote  that  she  grew  up  with  strong,  independent  women  all  around  her,  and  recoiled  from  their  hyper-­‐exaggerated  strength  and  perhaps  their  exaggerated  independence  as  well.    Confronting  those  images,  she  writes  that  she  found  the  masculine  Black  power  figure  appealing,  she  wanted  to  be  a  “woman  of  the  powerful  [man]”  (133).    In  a  sense,  these  images  capture  the  two  gender  narratives  that  she  perceived  growing  up  as  a  young  black  women  in  the  United  States,  and,  given  these  two  highly  racialized  and  gendered  roles,  she  chose  the  image  of  the  powerful  black  male  with  a  woman  at  his  side.  

I  think  that  these  images  are  not  only  examples  of  the  gender  and  race  narratives  that  Michelle  Wallace  speaks  about  in  her  book,  but  historical  artifacts  of  the  construction  of  those  narratives.    That  is,  for  girls  and  young  women  like  Michelle  Wallace,  these  images  served  as  highly  visual  representations  of  very  specific  forms  of  relationships  based  on  gender,  class  and  race.    I  struggled  with  Wallace’s  work  somewhat  because  I  lost  at  times  the  distinction  between  individual  people  and  the  construction  of  gender  and  racial  norms  that  are  not  only  restricting  but  codes  for  power  relations.    That  is,  I  struggled  with  a  text  that  at  times  seemed  highly  critical  of  women  that  Wallace  knew  and  found  too  independent,  too  strong.    I  would  argue  against  perceiving  independent  or  strong  women  as  part  of  a  racist  and  sexist  system,  because  I  feel  that  to  do  so  suggests  that  their  strength  marks  complicity  in  the  perpetration  of  systematic  oppression  against  them.    Or,  while  I  posit  the  images  above  as  resonating  with  the  archetypes  Wallace  describes,  I  don’t  feel  that  that,  for  example,  feel  that  the  “The  Beautiful”  woman  portrays  a  poor  role  models  to  readers  of  the  magazine.    I  don’t  believe  that  Wallace  was  arguing  that,  although,  again,  it  was  something  I  struggled  with  while  reading  it.    Reading  the  introduction  that  she  wrote  years  later  clarified  much  of  this  for  me;  I  think  that  she  focused  her  attention  on  the  systematic  reinforcement  of  sexism  and  racism  in  gender  narratives  and  less  critical  of  individual  people  who  may  or  may  not  find  

personal  fulfillment  and  personal  empowerment  in  being  individual,  in  being  “natural,”  in  being  “strong.”